A few things here that may not merit a post of their own.Firstly, the kerfuffle about the "hijab ban" by the European Court of Justice - this doesn't seem to have had an airing here. It is in fact a ruling that employers can require staff to have a "neutral" dress code prohibiting religious, political or philosophical symbols but only if applied across all staff and all beliefs and not at the behest of customers. This has, of course, been wilfully misinterpreted e.g.

The claim: The ruling by the EU's top court could exclude many Muslim women from the workplace.

Reality Check verdict: The EU court ruling does allow private companies to adopt rules that bar workers from wearing religious symbols under certain conditions but is not a blanket ban on Islamic headscarves.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39264845(That's not the link I had in mind - computer crashed and I couldn't find the article in a Q&A format again.)Next, still on hijabs, is an article from The Spectator. I include this patly because the Spectator is going behind a paywall allowing only two free articles a month. Here is the first

As a Muslim, I strongly support the right to ban the veilAt last, the European Court of Justice has made a stand for European values

I was raised as an observant Muslim in a British family. Women, I was taught, determine their own conduct — including their ‘veiling’. We’d cover our hair only if we freely chose to do so. That’s why I’m baffled by the notion that all good Muslim women should cover their hair or face. My entire family are puzzled by it too, as are millions like us. Not until recent years has the idea taken root that Muslim women are obliged by their faith to wear a veil.

It’s a sign, I think, not of assertive Islam, but of what happens when Islamists are tolerated by a western culture that’s absurdly anxious to avoid offence. This strange, unwitting collaboration between liberals and extremists has been going on for years. But at last there are signs that it is ending.

In response to cases brought by two veiled Muslim women from Belgium and France, the European Court of Justice has ruled that employers have the right to stop employees wearing visible religious symbols, including headscarves worn in the name of Islam. This ruling includes not only the burka and the niqab (already entirely banned from the public space by a number of European countries) but also the face-revealing hijab. The ruling goes two ways: if the company does tolerate religious symbols, then no employee can be asked to take them off.

In its ruling, the ECJ has made a secularist stand against Islamists who seek to dominate the public space. A secular public space allows me to practise my faith, as it allows others to observe theirs. As the Quran says (109:1-6): ‘To you your religion and to me, mine.’ Giving an employer the right to restrict the use of headscarves, in Britain or elsewhere, is good for every believer.

Europe’s elite rightly feel extinction breathing down their necksUsually the ruling politicians just hold hands and say Je Suis Charlie and hope it might all go away. Not now

Allahu Akbar! Greetings from Samsun, where Turkish protestors — their eyeballs spinning in orgasmic Islamic rage — tried to set fire to the Dutch flag while chanting the usual ‘Allah’s dead good’ stuff. They used cigarette lighters and some lighter fuel and up it went — and was then jubilantly trampled on by the inflamed, howling masses. Except that it wasn’t the Dutch flag — they had got hold of the French flag by mistake.

I wonder if any of the similarly inflamed Turkish protestors in the Netherlands would have noticed? My guess is most of those demonstrating in Rotterdam had spent their entire lives in the Netherlands, but possibly still wouldn’t know what the country’s flag looked like. I wonder if they would recognise a slice of Gouda, a black tulip or a little mouse wearing a pair of clogs, either.

Still, as one Turk apparently based in Norway tweeted: ‘If you rotate 90 degree… you will end up with the other. What does it matter. Two different views of the same sh!t.’

By ‘sh!t’, he meant western Europe — all the flags, all the politicians, all the nations, and all the Christian or secular people who inhabit them. And so one might ask the question: why exactly are you actually here, given that you hate us and our governments and our way of life? One supposes that the answer to that is complex. They hate us for what we stand for, what we represent, for our colonial oppression (the Ottoman Empire being temporarily and very quickly forgotten at this point), for their handily acquired victimhood and stupidity and for our infidel beliefs, or lack of them. But on the other hand they quite like the wages and the benefits and the lifestyles and the foxy Euro chicks, all the stuff that liberal civilisation has created. They like that side of it all well enough, but are too dense to see that one springs directly from the other. Too fuelled up by their hatred and God–given machismo.

Another Turkish idiot said, with the usual chest-beating, self-reverential braggadocio: ‘We as Turkish youths are ready for death at any moment everywhere for our country and our flag even at the expense of our lives.’ Even, yet. How absolutely bloody marvellous of you, effendi.

Dutch-Turkish relations are not looking too good right now. There are demands to kick out ambassadors and close the borders. This latest spat has occurred as a consequence of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to hold a referendum on whether Turkey should continue as a democracy or instead get Recep installed as a sort of inviolable Sun King. And the flat-faced thug is touting for diasporic votes across the affluent West — and arousing the annoyance of the pleasant governments there which do not like him and have barred his emissaries from addressing the exclaved legions.

Erdogan has called the Dutch ‘Nazi remnants and fascists’ — which shows how well acquainted he is with history — and the Muslim hordes have been demonstrating in his favour. We are used to the flag-burning and the howling, of course. We are also acquainted with those other benefits of an open and diverse Europe — the careering truck ploughing into the infidel pedestrians, the suicide bomb blowing the infidel to smithereens, the guns picking off the young infidel cockroaches one by one as they enjoy a pop concert, the knifings of infidels, the battering of infidels, the rapes of the female — and young male — infidels, the sexual assaults of infidels. Yes, we are accustomed to all that.

We have been less accustomed, until recently, to a stern response from Europe’s impeccably well-mannered governments. Usually the ruling politicians just hold hands with one another and say Je Suis Charlie and hope it might all go away, this awful stuff they have wilfully, or at best thoughtlessly, brought upon the continent.

But 2016 has put paid to that, because the politicians rightly feel extinction breathing right down their necks. Who would have expected the good ol’ liberal Dutch to ban the burka, or to stick it to Erdogan when he comes canvassing for votes, or to call for negotiations on Turkey’s ludicrous membership of the European Union to be ‘frozen’? And all this not from a right-wing populist Dutch government but a liberal Dutch government (for a bit, at least, inshallah).